Fusion Paintings

Early thoughts and intention concerning this series of paintings jotted down with the intention of becoming a ‘blog’. It began with a group of 4’ x 4’ paintings, four of them to be precise. All of them were painted on plywood sheets of equal thickness. Two of the paintings were portraits and two were depictions of rather horrid things.

The oligarch, a recurring problem

Falling into these two groups, horrid and portraiture, I paired them. I resolved to devise a way of merging them into each other.

This lizard is eating its young while it is giving birth

I will examine each painting to identify the main ‘fault lines’ of the picture.

I intend to place 2 pictures on top of each other, face up, and cut with a down-cutting jig saw along the ‘Faultline’ of the top board. The boards may be reversed occasionally to enable major ‘faultines’ of each picture gets cut.

The resulting pictures are laid out like a crossword puzzle beside each other on a table.

Both pictures have an identical pattern of cuts and pieces.

If one piece is taken from one picture it must be replaced by the equivalent on the other painting. In this way the continuity of the images are maintained. Gradually, as more and more pieces are exchanged, the two images fuse into each other. A process without end that could always return to the beginning

It is like having two thoughts in the mind at the same time. It is possible, we can all do it. Some people claim to have many voices speaking to them at the same moment. Or the fade between scenes in a cinema film.

I will possibly, at intervals, remove a piece and cut it further. That second piece may become a centre of merging in its own right. The possibilities are endless.

Thus I am proposing a project that relates to time passing and many visitors participating. The public will be invited to make the changes, carefully to observe the rule of ‘like changing with like’, and each change will be digitally recorded. Maybe a screen will play a loop of the development to date, it could be on the website permanently changing. I imagine a sort of frame being built to support a camera over the paintings. Each time a move is made, a button is pressed, and that new image joins the video. There would have to be lights around the pictures also, and a thought to health and safety. In theory this could be an eternally changing pair of paintings, weaving in and out of the two meanings.